I agree with you there Berny Mac. I have started to notice that a lot of lists for certain armies end up being (almost) the exact same. Also, it is more fun having a 'different' army as you can create and cool and unique background for it. It only becomes a problem when people go to extremes (but still legal). For instance, say a Lizardmen player decides that his army will just take as much magic power as it can, because it makes sense in the fluff and is 'different'. Then you are faced with a 2nd Generation Slaan with Temple Guard, and 2 lvl 2 Skink Priests...I know that this army is by no means unbeatable, but against an army with relatively little magic defence or even normal magic defence (say 5 dispel dice and a scroll (for 2000pt game by the way, I assume that is reasonable average)) they would not be able to stand up to that kind of magic (with the right magic items, that is 11 Power Dice with the ability to conserve 2 dispel dice from your own magic phase for use as power next time, and extra free dice for each spell, +1 to cast blah blah blah...You see where I am going.....The game is gonna be no fun.). I do think that armies should vary a lot more than they do, but chances are, if they vary far from the norm, chances are they will end up pretty unbalanced and unable to stand up to varying foes. I would imagine that is why so many lists are fairly similar (I know my lists are pretty bog standard for my Lizardmen and Dark Elves, and it bothers me that it is hard to think up an original story for the army because of that, but I personally prefer playing the game to any other aspect of Warhammer (such as painting and modelling). (Although I really do like having fluff for an army....makes it more fun). However (back to the point....) I like to have armies that can stand up to varying opponents without maximizing certain strengths of an army to the extreme, hence I (unintentionally) end up with an almost 'bog standard' army, like you said.... As much as I would like to make a really unique army, it is deceivingly hard to do without making it really unbalanced or 'cheesy' (and therefore, no fun for my opponent, and hence myself...). Oh well...
EDIT:
lol check out the thread in the Hordes of Chaos section about mortal chaos being claimed as cheesy. Hehe, I think that's funny